Meet Mélodie

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2012-01-30, 16:08:59

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... arDone.png
http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... ogress.png

Mélodie is a 68EC020 based computer designed to make sound using lots of FM.

Features :
1x 25 MHz 68EC020. Fully 32 bit lovely CPU.
1x 8.3 MHz Z80. 8 bit CPU for managing sound chips.
2x YMF276 aka OPN2. Total of 12x 4op FM channels, with 16 bit sound output instead of 9.
1x YMF288 aka OPN3. 6x 4op FM + 3x PAG (AY compatible) + 6x fixed sample PCM channels (remnant from YM2608)
1x YMF278 aka OPL4. up to 18x 2op FM but there's many configs. Also includes 24x PCM channels, using 2MB sound ROM and 1MB sound RAM.
1x YMF719 aka OPL3-SA3. MIDI UART, 8/16 bit PCM+IMA ADPCM+µLAw+aLaw playback and record, OPL3 FM, PC gameport and analog mixer
1x Osman aka Memory Controller. Manages up to 256MB of RAM over 72 pin SIMM sockets and other system functions.
1x Jorge aka I/O controller. Manages address decode and various system functions.
1x Richard aka MéGA aka Mélodie Graphics Architecture. Does all the graphics, up to 1024 x 576 resolution. 4 playfields, 512 sprites of any size. It kills Neo Geo when it comes to graphics but cannot do what Saturn can when it comes to 2D. It features RGBZ color system which allows 14.3 million colors from 15 bits. There are 32x 256 color palettes, all tiles and sprites are 256 colors. 2MB of local VRAM, directly accessible in CPU address space and thorugh I/O like on MD.

The board will be finished this year, but software side will take much more time.

I am only making 10 prototypes, most are already going for supporters. When working stuff is ready I will make more fuzz about it and see if perhaps 100 can be made.

When the time comes, estimated price is 200€ per board.
chassis, HDD, cables, memories etc. must be bought separately

Tom · Post by **Tom** » 2012-01-30, 18:03:12

The two links are 404s for me, probably because of the é in the filename.

That said, your project is awesome, and you know that. Glad that you posted about it here.

Now the question is, will vgm files manage to log this beast's output?

Post by **ValleyBell** » 2012-01-30, 18:38:47

So much FM ... that's much more than I ever dreamt of. Awesome.

About vgm: Yes, it can.
YMF276 = YM2612
YMF288 = YM2608
[pack] YMF278 (the OPL3 FM part is supported, too, but no VGM uses it at the moment)
YMF719 = YMF262 (OPL3 FM only)

I just doubt that even a modern PC can handle the software emulation of so much sound chips.

Sonic of 8! · Post by **Sonic of 8!** » 2012-01-30, 19:09:34

There is much FM channels. I prefer a number of FM channels equal to a PCM ones.

Tom · Post by **Tom** » 2012-01-30, 19:25:22

ValleyBell wrote:I just doubt that even a modern PC can handle the software emulation of so much sound chips.

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2012-01-30, 19:55:29

Tom wrote:The two links are 404s for me, probably because of the é in the filename.

That said, your project is awesome, and you know that. Glad that you posted about it here.

Now the question is, will vgm files manage to log this beast's output?

I changed the filenames, now they should work in other browsers besides just Opera.

I will make VGM logging available in the sound tools when I get to software side.

I personally don't think there's gonna be problems emulating all that FM, problems on performance side. I know sound will be wrong in many cases due to misemulation but that's gonna be minor and fixable.
Emulating the whole machine will be another story, its system components run at 100MHz internally and everything is a mix of synchronous and asynchronous processing... lot of parallelism

Tom · Post by **Tom** » 2012-01-31, 1:43:23

Just out of curiosity, where do the "14.3 million colors" come from? It's an unusual value, it's not a power of two, so I would like to know more about it...

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2012-01-31, 14:30:07

It is a power of 3

I am utilizing 3rd state of a digital signal.

Normally you only know about 0 and 1. But in real world there is Hi-z which basically means disconnected. In a computer you have many devices and all use same set of signals but only one device can drive the signals, all others disconnect themselves by putting their signals to Hi-z state.
I am using it on the 15 bit color output bus to get more colors than 32768 ^^

Tom · Post by **Tom** » 2012-01-31, 14:46:13

I see, clever. So the exact figure is 14348907. That's... unusual, but definitely impressive.

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2012-04-17, 7:17:07

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/4/21/ ... ntdone.png
The main board is nearly finished

zzo38 · Post by **zzo38** » 2013-04-23, 22:35:37

Will it play back .VGM files that use all of these chips together, in case someone writes a music file that has that?

Stefan_L · Post by **Stefan_L** » 2013-07-21, 16:23:13

Really interesting project... i am not a musician but i hope for some games will be released for this hardware, does it equal to Taito F3 graphics wise you think Tiido?

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2013-11-14, 23:35:36

...and after couple months I return...

I am not familiar with Taito F3 so I cannot comment on it.

The hardware has gone through radical changes, the main thing being there's no more Yamaha FM chips, but instead I'll have my own FM inspired sound synthesis core in the FPGA.
There's way more power in the new design, and graphically it is somewhere around Saturn level, but lacking sprite distortion support for now. Processing power will exceed that of Saturn.

*Custom CPU called "DDDDD" With pipeline pipeline and caching it can achieve close to 1:1 MIPS/MHz ratio. Fully orthogonal architecture with 23 addressing modes. Application specific instructions to speed up processing of common tasks.
*Enhanced MéGA with 16MBytes SDRAM and 2 banks of 576KBytes ZBT SSRAM.
+ 30bit color output, RGB only output.
+ Over 10K sprite pixels per line typical
+ Sprites rendered until there's cycles available
+ 512 sprite entries total, freely muxable, hardware aided muxing
+ 256 color paletted+alpha or 30bit direct color sprites(no alpha)
+ Sprites can be scaled and flipped, pixel level sizes
+ Up to 4 BG layers, with alphaing support. 256 color tiles
+ Resolutions fitting into 100MHz pixel clock available, but high resolutions will not leave much time for sprite or BG rendering.
+ Pixel level events support
+ 800MP fillrate
+ Unique VRAM layout allowing tiles and linear framebuffers at the same time.
*1GBit ethernet
*4x USB 2.0
*2x PS/2
*2x DB9 (MD compatible)
*Intelligent DMA engine capable of data pre/post processing (DSP style).
*Mélodie Sound System
+ Quadrophonic sound output. 16bit 100KHz max. Measurement grade R2R DAC
+ Mélodie Phase Adjustment Synthesis (more info in future)

There's more to the hardware but it will take lots of time to list it

The hardware manual is bigass and only gets worse LOL

Stefan_L · Post by **Stefan_L** » 2013-11-16, 21:48:23

Nice update, and great that it will use a unique FM soundchip

Tiido · Post by **Tiido** » 2013-11-16, 22:52:01

MéPAS is on the level of Saturn SCSP and Yamaha SY77/99, actually beyond due to much more flexibility. Saturn uses scaled back tech found in SY77/99, watch some vids on YT, it is truly amazing what it creates. Yamaha calls it Advanced FM.
MéPAS is similar to AFM but works in a different manner, but overall capability is very comparable.